Generation gap

The laws meant to protect future
generations may not last one more

After 31
years, my dad has just retired from the police force. Growing up
under the ever-watchful eye of a cop, I learned early that when you
break a rule, there’s no squirming out of punishment.
"Don’t you dare apologize," my dad would thunder when I got
into trouble. "You’re only sorry because you got caught."

Though he loves to hike and canoe, he’s a staunch
Republican with little patience for my whining about the
environment; we’ve knocked heads over politics my entire
life. But I’ve come to realize that it’s his fault
I’m an environmentalist: His choice of career more than three
decades ago shaped my naive faith in the law’s power to keep
this planet livable.

When I was 8, I wrote to President
Reagan, scolding him for not taking better care of rivers and
forests and oceans. A couple of weeks later, I received a letter,
complete with the Gipper’s rubber-stamped signature, that
essentially said, "That’s the Environmental Protection
Agency’s problem."

The EPA also sent a glossy
brochure that ticked off the laws it enforces: The Clean Water Act,
Clean Air Act, Superfund, Safe Drinking Water Act. The premise
behind the agency and the laws was simple enough for even a child
to understand. You clean up after yourself, and make sure you leave
things nice — or better yet, super — for everyone else.

As a teen-ager, when I complained about decimated
rainforests and oil spills in Alaska, my dad would reprimand me.
"Things are better now than when I was a kid," he told me once, as
we walked along the Housatonic River in Massachusetts. "In the
’50s, this river was green." Green, and sometimes pink: Back
then, the river ran whatever color the local mills happened to be
dyeing their paper that day.

But rivers like the
Housatonic didn’t spontaneously clean themselves, nor did
companies voluntarily stop dumping their waste in them. In the
1960s and 1970s — when my dad was roughly the age I am now
— Congress passed a string of environmental laws, laws
demanded by a public suddenly aware of the need for them.

Though revolutionary in a sense, these are the most sensible laws
Americans have today. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969
(NEPA) was enacted to "encourage productive and enjoyable harmony
between man and his environment." It requires federal agencies to
study the impacts of activities such as road building, logging,
mining and grazing before blindly approving projects. The 1964
Wilderness Act protects the last pristine chunks of land from being
lost forever. Even the Endangered Species Act of 1973 is pretty
straightforward: Plants and animals that humans are driving to
extinction deserve protection under a federal law.

But 40
years after Congress passed the first of these laws, companies
— and even the government itself — regularly violate
environmental laws without suffering any consequences. When
corporations contaminate water, leave vast tracts of land
uninhabitable or endanger public health, they can deny
responsibility and move on, leaving the cost of cleanup to
taxpayers. This happened in El Paso, Texas, where for more than 100
years, the mining giant Asarco has run a lead and copper smelter.
When the EPA declared portions of the city "emergency Superfund
sites" because of arsenic and lead contamination, the company
denied responsibility, then said it couldn’t afford cleanup
at the El Paso site — or at any of the 45 other Superfund
sites it is responsible for — anyway. When the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation allowed rivers to dry into cesspools that killed
endangered fish — such as the silvery minnow in the Rio
Grande or the coho salmon in the Klamath River — no one got
in trouble. No one even apologized. Instead, officials sent out
press releases saying it wasn’t their fault.

Even
more worrisome, President Bush and the 108th Congress are
demolishing this country’s legacy of environmental
protection. Under the Energy Bill, which Congress plans to vote on
this year, oil and gas companies would be exempt from the Clean
Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Power plants would
become dirtier and less safe under changes to the Clean Air Act.
The U.S. Department of the Interior is giving potential wilderness
areas to oil and gas drillers instead of protecting them for future
generations. Congress no longer collects the Superfund tax from
corporations — instead, citizens have to foot the bill for
cleanup. The White House and Republican lawmakers are trying to
"streamline" NEPA, because they say it slows down energy and
transportation projects. The Endangered Species Act no longer
protects species unlucky enough to live where "wildfire thinning"
or "fuel-reduction" projects are proposed. (And when protection of
an endangered species gets in the way of development and growth, as
has happened with the Rio Grande’s silvery minnow, lawmakers
simply change the law.)

As my dad rediscovers how nice
life off the force is, he’s gearing up for trips to wild
places — he’s already planning to go to Alaska and
Nevada, two states he’s never seen. He’s also eager to
visit his 16-month-old granddaughter, Molly, who lives in the Rocky
Mountains, and who can coax a smile out of him in a way
that’s completely new to my brother and me.

As my
niece grows up, I’m looking forward to the day my dad takes
her hiking. I’m hoping he’ll repeat to her the same
words he said to me 15 years ago: "Things are better now than when
I was a kid." And I’m hoping that she can say the same to her
grandchildren.